Sunday, February 1, 2009

How to Have the Best Looking YouTube Videos Around

By Marcus Richard

You know youve done it. Youre part of the YouTube generation and youve not only watched videos but uploaded them as well. Once you did that though you realized the quality of your video just sucked. You tried a variety of things and still arent happy with the quality.

So heres the skinny on what you need to do to get your videos to be all they can be on YourTube without massive headaches, expensive hardware and Hollywood-sized editing budgets. The following are the major points to take into account prior to uploading your videos.

Resolution " YouTube display in a fairly specific resolution and to help their compression utilities get your video up with the minimum of loss of quality you need to match your video up to their resolution. Since theyre using 720p now, which means you should have 1280x720 pixel resolution you need to set your video resolution accordingly. This will cut down on compression time and give you a better idea of what your video will look like in the end. Its not so bad really. The resolution is HD and that means that you can get a real HD experience out of YouTube.

Bitrate " Without getting into the technical mumbo jumbo, this is how much information each second of your video is. The more information means the better quality generally. So when youre making your video, editing or converting youll want to get this to somewhere around 6 Megabits-per-second and 8 Megabits-per-second. This will give you a large file size that should fit into the YouTube limits (1GB) and still give you ample quality after the YouTube compression process. This is a good way to make sure your video will retain some semblance of what it looked like when you made it.

What else can you do to help YouTube make your video the best it can be? Well you can make sure your audio tracks are set to MP3 or AAC encoding (44.1KHz Stereo) for one. Another thing you can do is make sure the file format is H.264, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 format because quite simply, YouTube doesnt really like much else. You can get yourself a video editor that handles multiple formats to help you with all of this and so that you can convert and edit as you need. You neednt pay a lot for one, even Quicktime Pro is only $30. Finally you can keep your video file above 30 frames per second and this will help reduce jitter after the compression process.

Once youve got all this, upload your video, wait for YouTube to process it and you should a nice looking video pushed out to the site for your friends, family and complete strangers. Good Luck in your video marketing efforts. - 17944

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